Anastasia Tubanos

Video Interview with Sharon Koifman of Applicure

If you've been to as many hosting events as we've been to, it's likely you've run into this wonderfully outspoken, ginger-haired deal-maker. Yes, I'm talking about Sharon Koifman, who holds the title of director of hosting at web application security solutions provider Applicure Technologies (www.applicure.com)

Sharon describes Applicure's solution as one of the most versatile and robust application security solutions on the market, yet touts its ease of installation and use to secure both Linux and Windows servers against attacks attempting to exploit application vulnerability.

Sharon goes into quite a bit of enthusiastic depth about the software and its effectiveness compared to any competing products in the market in this WHIR TV interview.

Video Interview with Eduardo Villa of Hosting Panama

Although offshore hosting is a term that unfortunately still makes people think of questionable business activity and unreliable service, as with this recent case reported by The Register about offshore hosting provider HavenCo spontaneously going offline it's also a business model that is constantly gaining legitimacy in the industry and that more companies looking to host their servers offshore are becoming more educated about and comfortable with.

We recently caught up with Eduardo Villa, chief sales officer at Hosting Panama (http://www.hostingpanama.com), who shed some light into what the business of offshore hosting is really all about and why Panama in particular is such a popular destination for companies that want to host their websites and servers offshore.

WHIR TV - Chic New Look, Same Valuable Content

As tempting as it is to gush on-and-on about my immense excitement over the snazzier, more sophisticated theWHIR.com, Liam has done a fine job of describing the new features and functions behind our revamped look.

So I'll get right to the part that's near and dear to my heart - WHIR TV!

As you can see, WHIR TV has found a permanent (and rather prominent) placement on the right side of the home page with a user-friendly player and convenient list of interviews and features right underneath, posted in chronological order of course, going as far back as Parallels 2008.

And folks, WHIR TV is now accessible on essentially every page of our website. EVERY PAGE. Just look to the right of this blog post. Yep...there it is.

The added bonus is that you can watch these videos RIGHT from this player without having to navigate away to another page. So if you're reading a story about SoftLayer, let's say, and want to see whether we've done an interview with them in the past, you can simply scroll through the list under the player and pull up the most recent interview we did with SoftLayer, in this case with CEO Lance Crosby.

Our videos can also be accessed through the WHIR TV tab at the top of the page. If you click here, you'll be navigated to a well-organized and stylish layout of all our interviews and event coverage.

The large player on the left features our most recently uploaded video by default. But the thumbnails to the right display all our segments (again from most recent to least recent) with a brief description of what you can expect from each one

Hilariously enough (well, I'm sure it is to Liam who rather openly pokes fun at our earlier iterations of WHIR TV with our BADASS [not really] green screen set) we've even posted our weekly news reviews from when we started WHIR TV in 2005:) All joking aside, I'm so proud of how far along WHIR TV has come since then.

Scrolling down past the player, thumbnails and comments, you'll see a section called Video Features. If you click on any one of the three links there, you'll be navigated to a similar looking WHIR TV layout playing only our Video Features content, including segments with The Planet, OpenSRS and FORTRUST. The Video Features can also be accessed from the yellow Video Features tab within the WHIR TV page.

Another new feature is that you can now comment on each and every video we post through the comment section right under the video player.

The video player also has a menu button on the bottom left where you can get a permalink, embed, share and rate videos.

Further (if you didn't already know this from our previous site) you can conveniently keep up-to-date with WHIR TV through RSS, iTunes and YouTube!

Phew! That about covers it. So please, feel free to navigate through the new WHIR TV and let us know how you like it! And heck, if you find any gems from our older videos you feel compelled to share, please go right ahead :)

Video Interview with Vinay Nagpal, Tata Communications

With the almost 100 subsidiaries in industries as diverse as tea and steel, Tata Communications' hosting services are becoming a major world-wide player with more than one million square feet of data center and colocation facilities worldwide.

Considering the international presence this company has in this market, it seems Tata Communications has been flying relatively under the radar until only recently when it began making a major push in its North American marketing for its managed services (although, arguably, the North American market may have been hearing about Tata's automobile subsidiary since January when it unveiled what's been considered the company's boldest initiative yet: Tata Nano, dubbed "the people's car" that will sell for $2,500, less than half the cheapest car on the market.)

In the hosting space, Tata has been making waves since September, when the company announced the worldwide launch of its BitGravity CDN service as well as its expanded global virtual private network Extended Access Service to enable customers in more than 150 countries access to a cost-effective solution that does not require dedicated links.

Most recently, Tata reported on the global availability of its new Vulnerability Management Service (a key part of its Managed Security Services suite)

We recently sat down with Vinay Nagpal, director of product management, hosting and data center services to discuss Tata Communications' next steps in the hosting space and aggressive growth in emerging markets.

Video Interview with Joey Widener, AT&T

Riding on the swelling wave of utility and cloud computing solutions that have been rapidly surfacing in the industry over the last few months, in August, AT&T launched AT&T Synaptic Hosting, an offering the company describes as "its next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses."

As part of AT&T's $1 billion planned global network investment in 2008, the new utility computing service combines technology acquired from USinternetworking with five "super IDCs" (Internet data centers) in the US, Europe and Asia.

The company says a core feature of its service is its next-generation utility computing platform, enabling customers to use the AT&T network to manage applications, compute resources on servers and store data.

A snapshot of the network diagram of AT&Ts Synaptic Hosting service.

Additionally, AT&T says the service is integrated into a virtualized "pay-for-what-you-use" infrastructure than can adapt to changing demands from users or applications.

While in Las Vegas, WHIRtv sat down with Joey Widener, senior product manager for AT&T's hosting and application services about AT&T's push into the utility computing market.